


Forget Your Fear

by orphan_account



Category: Yes (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-13
Updated: 2013-01-13
Packaged: 2017-11-25 10:07:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/637750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>College AU. Chris and Jon are roommates, but depending on whether or not Jon can keep his focus, they may not be for very long...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forget Your Fear

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vapours](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vapours/gifts).



> A friend and I came up with this idea. Another friend reminded me of it. My best friend vapours demanded I write it. There's going to be a second part that picks up exactly where this one leaves off.

When Chris found Jon’s latest History assignment balled up in the rubbish bin with yet another failing grade scrawled across it, he crumpled it right back up and chucked it back in. Wherever the little git had gone this time it clearly had nothing to do with any thought on his marks, nothing to do with any thought on his scholarship, or his future, or all the time Chris had spent helping him study. His mattress squeaked when he plunked back onto it, hiding his face in his hands, shaking his head. He’d spent so much time and Jon didn’t even care.

At the beginning of the term he’d been enthusiastic enough. They both had. They’d just met, the two of them floating together in their dormitory among a sea of first-years. Back then, Chris had admired Jon, an eager little Northern boy from a nearly-destitute family who, had his gift for poetry not proved himself worthy enough for a scholarship, wouldn’t have even finished upper school. Jon had the drive, he had goals, he had hopes. Meanwhile Chris had never truly worried; an only child, his parents sent him to the best schools, always had plenty for him, and he coasted his way through school, never studying, never sparing a moment to grow concerned for his academic standing, and, as it followed, never figuring out what to do with himself.

So he saw in his roommate something to look up to. Jon had something to do with himself. Jon had something for which to strive. But while Chris spent the first few weeks of the term sleeping in and missing class, bathing too long and missing class, falling asleep while bathing and missing his assignments, he watched for the first time his grades fall, Jon’s attention drifted. It always had. He bubbled like a drink from the moment they’d met but Chris never guessed that Jon could throw away the opportunity he’d been given until they were walking together one morning down to the dining hall and Jon said he thought he was failing his Chemistry lab.

That morning Chris decided he wouldn’t let himself get distracted anymore. Lead by example, perhaps—if he could watch his clock then perhaps Jon could watch his books. But Jon didn’t, so Chris figured the next step would be to study with him. And for weeks they did. Jon sat beside him on the floor of their dorm room, hopped up in place when he had a question, made songs out of the information, got more and more right each evening. Sat closer and closer to read the book or look at the notes. Told him more and more often how much he appreciated his attention.

But he still was failing. How soon, Chris wondered, would it be before Jon’s GPA dropped below the minimum he had to maintain to keep that scholarship? He found himself doing math but in this state nothing added up, nothing divided correctly, even when he counted out the digits on his hands, enormous unwieldy things before him. He had to go find Jon and talk this all over with him or he’d explode, but he hadn’t seen him since they left for their classes that morning, and by now, this late in the afternoon, he should have been back. He pushed himself up from the bed, reached back down into the rubbish bin, picked up the wadded homework, and shoved it into his pocket.

Before he left, though, he turned around to inspect the room. Clues, hints, ideas, anything, had to lay before him. A fluffy black and white coat lay over Jon’s desk but this week had been too unseasonably warm for it, anyway. Some change glittered on the floor, a few pence, nothing useful. Jon hadn’t made his bed but Jon never made his bed, just got up and threw the covers back in the morning and curled himself back up into them at night, like a flower closing its petals at sundown.

A petite Jon-shaped impression had formed in the mattress. He never moved in his sleep.

Chris gave up on the room. He locked the door on his way out and headed down the hall. A missing roommate was a matter to discuss with the sub-warden, but as soon as the though occurred to Chris he groaned.

The sub-warden for their building was an enormous blond Master’s student in the Music program named Rick Wakeman. He had befriended Jon at some point early on in the term and, while Chris couldn’t say he didn’t like him, he found he could be around him only for short spurts before an empty, exhausted feeling came over him, like a sigh stuck in his chest. Rick liked to drink and he liked to poke fun at anything and everything. How he became sub-warden, Chris didn’t know, but he liked Jon well enough, and there was even a chance Jon could be with him, so Chris approached his room.

 The door sat ajar, so Chris stared at it. Ajar doors unnerved him. They neither invited nor excluded, so he could never decide whether to push them open and call inside or knock and risk letting it drift wide anyway. He coughed. Then he stepped back. Then he coughed again, bit his lower lip, lifted his knuckles to the door, dropped his hand, and exhaled.

“Squire, what are you doing dancing in front of my door?” Rick’s voice called from inside. “Come in.”

Chris groaned, but the sound stayed in his throat. He couldn’t even embarrass himself without getting caught. He stepped inside, pushing the door back into position behind him. “Evening,” he said.

“What brings you here?” Rick, lounging on his couch, dropped a magazine onto the floor, and stretched so that his feet nearly knocked over a lamp he had sitting on a table at one end. One of the perks of being sub-warden was a single room, no roommate and a separate bedroom. Rick furnished his surroundings with discarded outerwear, beer cans, and electrical equipment, a landscape of metal and cotton, an eviscerated electric sheep, an android’s nightmare.

Jon was not here. Not in this part of the room, anyway.

“I’m looking for J—Anderson,” Chris said. “I haven’t seen him since this morning.”

Rick sat up, pulling his “Pollution is a Dirty Word” shirt back into place. “It’s only three, though,” he said.

“Four,” Chris replied. Then he looked at his watch. He called himself lucky.

“Well, I’ve gone and wasted my life, then.” Rick tapped a finger against his lips. “Look, alright, I saw him around noon. I said I was going to that party over in the co-ed building tonight and I asked him if he wanted to go with me.”

Chris breathed, his hands rolling into fists at his sides in time. Had he been here too long already?

“Go with you,” he parroted.

Rick shrugged. “He said he’d probably go but he wasn’t sure. I haven’t seen him since. I don’t know, though, it’s kind of early, but you might want to head over there, to the co-ed building, and see if he’s there already. You never know.”

Chris nodded. He’d probably go. With Rick. To a party. On campus. In the co-ed dorm. Nothing coalesced, nothing about such a series of facts added up, and even when they started to, Chris forced them away from each other. He collected his breath and turned around to leave, told Rick thanks just loud enough for him to be able to hear.

“He’s fine, Chris,” Rick called out. “You know how he is.”

What could Chris even say to that? Whatever prevented him from responding pushed him out the door and down the stairs. He didn’t look back and he wouldn’t think about all the times he’d walked past that room on the way to his and heard Rick offering some deadpan one-liner and Jon giggling in reply, all the times Jon noted something that “ _Ricky_ ” had pointed out while they were studying, all the times Jon had to put something on hold in order to go do this or that with the sub-warden. He made it outside before he could try to insist to himself that he should really focus on finding Jon instead of seething about that mark and how Rick had to have played some part in bringing it about.

He leaned against the brick wall of the building. December brought a chill but some freak front cancelled all chances of snow or rain or even clouds. Chris closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath of the air, the distant sun reaching out to brush over his face.

Jon wrote poems about the sun. Dozens of them. He had a kind of fascination with it, bordering on sun worship. His philosophy was that it made sense to worship the sun, since all life arose from its heat and its light, so the earliest religions truly had to be the right ones. It was an opinion he said he’d never voice around his God-fearing parents. He had a lot, he said, that he’d never let them know.

“I’d sooner die,” Jon had said. “Than let anyone know something more about me than I do of them.”

“You might as well already be dead, then,” Chris had replied. “I think everyone knows more about everyone else than they think.”

“What do you know about me?” Jon asked.

“You’re scared.”

And Jon had nodded.

Whatever had scared him now must have sent him away, Chris thought. Distracted him or pushed him into a party or made him resit an exam. Chris couldn’t guess what it was that Jon feared and he supposed he really had no right to know, but he knew that if he ever did get to learn, he’d do whatever he could to rid him of it. Or at least soothe it. Someone who felt something as massive and far away as the sun deserved appreciation needed a hand to hold.

Chris pushed himself away from the wall and set off in the direction of the sun. At this hour this late in the year it fell behind the trees but still had some time before it exploded into a sunset. It rested on the other side of the co-ed building, to the west of Chris’ men’s building, a long line that cut more or less straight over the hills of the campus that somewhere, he hoped, would terminate in Jon. He had to brave an eventual party in order to inspect it. He took one last breath of the afternoon before heading into the co-ed building.

Sitting right in the lobby, of all the people in the world, were his and Jon’s two suitemates. Steve Howe and Bill Bruford shared the room on the other side of their bathroom. Two studious Economics students, they made no trouble with each other, though ever since he’d moved in, Bill had had some kind of problem with Chris. And ever since one incident in which Chris flooded their bathtub, Bill had taken to calling him the Fish, as if it justified all the hatred he’d built up for no other reason for all those weeks. Here the two of them sat together on a sofa. Steve waved Chris over, since Bill resolved to glowering next to him.

“Here for the party, huh?” Chris asked, waving back as he approached.

“Yeah, aren’t you?” Steve replied. He gave him a crooked smile, the only kind he could, though it showed more successfully in his eyes.

Bill scoffed, leaning on the arm of the sofa with his fingers twirling in his thick blond curls. “Of course the Fish is here. I was supposed to have had a good night.”

Steve shot him a reprimanding look but turned right back to Chris. “Where’s Anderson?”

Damn. “Good question,” he replied. “I’m actually looking for him. Guess you haven’t seen him, though.”

“You didn’t check with Wakeman? That’d be the first place I’d look.” Bill chuckled out of the corner of his mouth, a sound that led only to a smirk and a glare in Chris’ direction. “You know they’re shagging.”

At once the sigh rose, stuck in Chris’ throat, and dropped into his stomach with force enough to make his whole body shake. “No they aren’t,” he growled, sucking in his lips to restrain his voice the moment he heard it. “Of course I checked with Wakeman. They’re not shagging though.”

“Are too,” Bill grinned. “Everyone knows it. I’ve heard them.”

Steve glanced between Chris and Bill. “You have not, Bill, stop it,” he said. “They’re not shagging, Squire, don’t listen to him. Nobody’s shagging.”

“Oh, come on, you know they are.” Bill rolled his eyes. “When he’s not with the Fish he’s over with Wakeman, and we all know Anderson and the Fish aren’t shagging. Are you?”

It would have taken Chris a month to wind up for the punch he wanted to send flying into Bill’s face. He felt the white on his knuckles and the sediment chipping away from his grinding teeth. Steve reached up and patted him on the arm, offering the same gesture to Bill, and Chris held his breath.

“I’m,” he began. “I’m going to—go—see you later.”

And he twirled around and stomped away, neither proud nor disappointed that he hadn’t shut Bill up with his fist. Wherever he was going, he still heard, for a few moments until he reached the door back outside, Bill murmuring to Steve: “You know they are. You know they are,” and Steve replying, “Yes, but you don’t have to get like that in front of him.”

Outside again. Another breath. The sun retreating behind the building, behind the trees, behind the hills. Chris set off walking, one step for each breath. He had to focus on the sun or he’d never find Jon.

What would he do if he never found him, other than wonder forever where he could have gone? Of course Jon would turn up sooner or later, he told himself—so really, what would Chris do if he never got to talk to Jon about that failed assignment? What if he never got to help him study again and Jon never brought his grades up and he couldn’t go to university anymore and he had to move all the way back up to Accrington? Whatever answers Chris could reason into being showed up behind a swath of black. That same jammed sigh that kept him from being near Rick for too long jutted up into the air before him to cloud his vision. He couldn’t envision what his university experience would be like if he didn’t have Jon with him, and he wrapped his arms around his body to shield himself from a cold that he realized a moment later he hadn’t actually felt in the air.

What was it with Jon? A tiny sun-worshiping poet who couldn’t keep his side of the room clean and who was so excited about everything he saw that he couldn’t pick out one thing to be excited about for more than a few seconds. Jon told Chris once that he reminded him of the sea, because his eyes were the color of it, and he couldn’t see through him, and he used that as a rebuttal when Chris insisted that everyone knew more about everyone else than they thought.

But Jon was wrong. Nobody knew Chris better than Jon did. Nobody else knew how to change his mood, nobody else knew what songs to sing that would make him laugh or smile, nobody else could predict how he would react to such revelations as, “I’m failing my Lab, I am.”

Chris had replied to that with, “Don’t you dare,” and Jon had said, “Please help.”

Jon had never meant to fail, even now. Chris reached into his pocket and squeezed the crumpled assignment, feeling more than hearing the paper fold and crackle and soften, and over that the manmade campus lake churned in the breeze, and over that a rasping alto lilted through the deepening sunset air.

Jon sat in the grass on the adjacent edge of the lake, his shoes at his side and his feet in the water. He held a marble composition book in his lap but it could have slid off and into the water and he wouldn’t have noticed. In his rush over to Jon’s side Chris didn’t notice the song he sang, but he may very well have sang nonsense syllables and he would have sounded the same.

“Jon!” Chris called, far too loud for his proximity. He closed the gap between them in the time it took for Jon to turn and look toward him and smile. “Jon,” he said again. “There you are, I’ve been looking for you.”

“Oh!” Jon squeaked. He brushed his hair, long and dark and wavy, over his shoulder, and then moved his notebook and shoes to his other side, but kept his feet in the water. “Oh, goodness, how terribly inconvenient of me, do sit, Christopher, please, have a seat with me.”

Chris obeyed. For a moment he followed Jon’s lead and stared out along the line of the lake. Across the water the buildings of the main campus sat on the hills and rose into the air, all silhouetted save for the windows, each aglow like a shattered, sunlit mirror. This hour now was the hour for the sun to quicken its descent. The sky gleamed with the pale gold of the edge of a flame.

“How long have you been out here?” Chris asked.

“Heavens,” Jon shrugged. “I’d say since nigh on two or so, I would. The weather was just lovely today, wasn’t it, and I set about not to miss a moment of it! So I sat out here and wrote for a while, got some delightful, delightful little poems out, I did, one for you, even, but then I thought to myself, oh, Jonny, don’t go missing the sunset, now! So here I am, watching it for all the time it shall last. It’s been so beautiful a day, Mother Sun shall give us a splendid show to say goodnight, hmm?”

Chris scratched the back of his neck, tapped at the crinkled lump in his pocket. “Yeah.”

“Whyever have you been looking for me?” Jon asked. “I should say I’m glad you have.”

He thought it karma that he’d let his hand linger on his pocket. He searched the skyline for a star, that he might wish upon it that he didn’t have to bring this up at all and that everything could be okay and he could find a direction and Jon could find his focus but all he found was the assignment balled up like an ailing protoplanet in his pocket. He pulled it out, opened it up. “I found this,” he said.

Jon leaned over, narrowing his round, dark eyes at it, and then, with a hand like a jumping spider, snatched it and wadded it up once again. He reared back as if to throw it but tossed it into his lap inside. It gave a weak ricochet against his shin. Harrumphing, he folded his arms and turned away.

“I’ve ruined the sunset, haven’t I,” Chris sighed.

“I really tried on that one, I did!” Jon said, his voice a lapdog’s bark. “I canna do History an’ I canna do Chemistry an’ I canna do Maths, only poetry, Chris, an’ what i’this world am I to do if Ah’m to lose it? Fatll be I th foyar!”

“Jon, Jon, Jon, Jon, Jon.” Chris put an arm around him, the motion bringing Jon toward him despite a whine. “Calm down, okay, I can’t help you when you go full Lanky. You wanna go over that again for me?”

Jon breathed but in his hands he tore the homework paper to confetti. “I thought I was getting smarter.”

“You are smart,” Chris replied. Jon not smart, he scoffed, the thought sent his brows knitting. “You’re very smart! When you pay attention, you pick up on everything like bloody _that_.” A snap of his fingers. “You just drift. Look at yourself, look how long you’ve been here.”

Lifting his hand, Jon seemed to weigh releasing the scraps of paper to the wind. But the wind would carry them into the water, so he dropped it back into his lap. Settled against Chris’ shoulder. Let the air take his sigh away. “It’s ever so beautiful here, though. Could stay out here watching it every evening of my life, was I given the chance.”

Chris huffed, the air bristling against him, suddenly too cold wherever Jon’s body didn’t touch him. He knew Jon understood, knew he made the connection between his marks and his scholarship and the sunset, but something still bothered Chris, so he shuddered. “Well, then, get your ruddy marks up so you don’t lose your scholarship and you can stay here with me!”

One of them looked at the other first, but Chris didn’t know. He recovered from a gasp he didn’t remember releasing. That was it. The air grew warm again, his skin hotter with Jon touching it, his breath evened. The sigh flew free into the pinkest band of sunset.

Jon opened his hand, let the scraps fall between his legs. He wrapped his arm around Chris’. Just settled back into place with his head on his shoulder. “You’re scared, too, aren’t you,” he said. “Of loving me.”

Chris rubbed his face as if he could buff his blush away. He pulled Jon close, rested his chin on the top of his head, gazed out at the sun. “Damnit. Because what if you leave. I’m going to be sick.”

Atop Chris’ thigh, Jon wove his long, tapered fingers between Chris’ and held his hand in place. “I love you, too,” he said.

“I love you,” Chris murmured. Not a reply. What he should have said in the first place, if he had known the language to say it.

A gold beam of light shot out from the orb of the sun and disappeared behind a lilac cloud. Together Chris and Jon watched the cloud coast past. By the time it had gone the sun had sunk behind the line of the trees. The closer night drew, they closer they did.

“I think that party’s starting,” Jon said. “The music, do you hear it?”

Chris held his breath to listen. A soft stereo sound wafted over the hills, some song he couldn’t place. He wondered if he’d ever collect himself enough to recognize a song again. “Yeah,” he answered. “Are you still going to that party?”

Jon shook his head, so Chris asked, “Really? Not even with R—not even with Wakeman?”

“Oh, Ricky’ll be fine,” he replied. “He wants me to go with him for he’s after that Bowie lad from the co-ed building and it’s not he’s unconfident, I think, he’s just wanting a body to see him go for him, is all, you see.”

Chris could have fallen over. “You mean he’s—huh.”

Jon cocked his head but didn’t ask for clarification. Good enough for Chris. He could bury all his thoughts on that matter as a rumor and a rumor only. He breathed in the last shimmer of sun.

Jon said, “I’m tired, Christopher.”

“Let’s go to the dorm, then,” he replied.

Jon rolled aside to let Chris rise to his feet and extend a hand to help him up. Jon grabbed it with his free one, since he held his notebook in the other. He had such large hands, ones that didn’t belong on someone his size. As he held it in his own Chris found himself comparing the size of them both, the shape of their fingers, the quality of their skin. Jon’s hands may not have fit on his body but they were still smaller than Chris’, smoother, more graceful. Chris had gawky ones, like rooster’s wings.

Seizing hold on Chris’ hand, Jon stood on his toes, pulled Chris down to meet him, and kissed him. A throb, a tingle, a wave of soft heat like a spring zephyr, like the sun saying farewell. When he pulled away Jon said, “Carry me,” and Chris knelt to let Jon climb onto his back. He looped his arms under Jon’s thighs and obeyed, carried him all the way back across the hills, past the co-ed building where Steve and Bill shared their incorrect rumors, into the men’s hall, up the stairs, past Rick’s room where the sub-warden must have confided in Jon his erstwhile desires, and into their room, where he lay Jon in that perfect indent of his shape. His notebook slipped to the floor. Chris climbed in behind him, wrapping his arms around Jon’s stomach, curling his whole long body around Jon’s compact one, nestling his face into the curve of his neck. They would not study that night.

Jon let out a happy little sigh, shuffling his body to press his back and his thighs and whatever else he could back against Chris. “What a silly time for a party, don’t you think?”

Chris chuckled. Far away he could hear the music, louder now that it had gone dark out. “Not even six on a Friday, honestly,” he replied. “They don’t even have good music.”

“It’s good enough,” Jon said. “I just don’t want to hear it right now.”

“What do you want to hear?”

He squeezed Chris’ hand where it lay on his stomach. Chris smiled, nuzzled some thick black hair out of the way of Jon’s ear with his nose. “You’re the poet,” he said. “I don’t know what you want me to say to you.”

Jon let a shiver pass before answering. “What would you do if I had to leave? Tell me about that.”

“Follow you,” Chris replied without thinking. He laughed at himself, breathy and stupid, but he couldn’t go back on it without lying. “Like an idiot. Probably live the rest of my days up in Lancashire with you, if I had to, least then I’d learn your language whenever you’re upset. I could get a job on one of those farms you used to work on. You wouldn’t have to worry about anything, though, you’d get published and you’d be world-renowned and all. Big famous poet with this gawky city boy hauling around hay bales because he’s in love with you. But that’s not going to happen, Jon, you’re going to get your marks up and we’ll stay here together.”

Jon hummed, the sound of a smile.

When the noise from the distant party began to creep in again, Jon wriggled in his place once more, but he didn’t say anything, and Chris’ mind began to wander, his eyes following the waves of Jon’s hair so like the surface of the lake, dark where the light didn’t sparkle on it, and Chris remembered Jon’s delight when he first approached, and he said, “You said you wrote a poem for me.”

Another wriggle. “I was looking at the water and I thought of you.” Like he knew.

“So is it about me or is it about the water?” Chris asked. Either meant the same thing, as far as he cared.

“It’s about when you look at something and part of you thinks you know everything there is to know about it and part of you thinks you don’t know the first thing of it and you could spend all the days of your life trying to figure the lot of it out, whether you do or you don’t, and then you realize that it matters not a whit for you care about it so, and that’s the only thing that matters, it is.”

This time Chris wriggled. He brought Jon close to him, closer even than he thought he could, and leaned in, kissed him on the patch of skin below his ear and above the curve of his jaw. A spot whose name he didn’t know and didn’t care to know, since it was so smooth, and so soft, and so warm.

“It is,” he said. “It is.”


End file.
